“It’s just bizarre that so many people in my neighborhood alone had cancer,” said Diana Locke, 62, who grew up on School Street, near the National Fireworks Co.

The 280-acre National Fireworks Co. operated for 60 years as a munitions manufacturing and testing facility. Town officials are working with the state to map out a plan to pay for cleanup, but without the federal Superfund label.

Locke said that she lived close enough to National Fireworks that she and her twin sister used it as a playground when they were girls.

Both of Locke’s parents died of cancer, and her twin has been fighting cancer for more than two years.

As recently as last October, Hanover’s director of community services sought more health information related to the site and asked the state Department of Public Health to delve into rates of bladder, urinary, thyroid and prostate cancer between 2003 and 2008.

The answer came back a couple of months later: There was nothing unusual in those cancer rates, the Health Department said.

But a more in-depth study released in 2007, prompted by a request a year earlier from concerned residents, examined high rates of thyroid cancer and searched for a link to a chemical commonly used in explosives: perchlorate.

The state’s evaluation found that between 1999 and 2003 in the town’s southern census tract rates of thyroid cancer in women were more than four times the expected rate: nine cases when two were expected.

State health officials looked at Hanover’s drinking water for possible exposure to perchlorate, which affects thyroid functions. But they reported that 98 percent of Hanover uses public water, and the nearest town well to the fireworks site is more than 2 miles away.

Only one town well showed levels of perchlorate but at very low levels: .3 parts per billion when the threshold for reporting is 1 part per billion.

The health report also looked at residential history of the women diagnosed with thyroid cancer and found that eight of them lived in Hanover for less than 10 years.

“Given that most cancers have long periods of development, between 10 and 40 years, their length of residence makes it unlikely that their place of residence played a role in their diagnosis,” the report stated.

Page 2 of 2 - Town leaders are confident that the site poses no health risks.

“The DEP and DPH have been working on this site for the better part of three decades. If there were a public health concern, they would have raised it,” said Troy Clarkson, Hanover’s town manager.

Health assessments of Superfund sites, he said, are usually “cut and paste jobs.” More in-depth health studies of waste sites are “connected with whether there was a community group screaming about the site,” said Ozonoff.

The concerned voices are not organized or screaming, but they are worried.

Jim Locke of Hanson said his mother worked at the factory in the 1950s, gave birth to a son with Down syndrome in 1965 and had leukemia at the end of her life.

Donna Lanzarin and her sister Diana Locke, Jim’s wife, share concerns that contamination from the factory contributed to all the illness.

“My dad, my mom, even my step-mom, all of us became very ill,” said Lanzarin, 62, who now lives in Arkansas and has undergone radiation therapy and surgery to fight cancer of the vulva and urethra. She also had three miscarriages.

“Diana and I used to play on top of rusty barrels down there (at the factory),” she said. “The smell was like sulfur in the air.”

Patricia Watts, who moved to Hanover six years ago, knew nothing about the contaminated site and used to walk her two dogs on the nature trail there owned by the town.

“You stand on the bridge and see people fishing. It looks like something out of L.L. Bean,” she said. “But we don’t walk in there anymore.”